The next couple of years are going to be amazing for Cranstontage, my Youtube channel devoted to Bryan Cranston tribute videos. Through 2012, we'll see Cranston in Drive, Contagion, Red Tails, John Carter, Rock of Ages, Total Recall, and Argo. That covers WWII, the 1980s, modern day, and the future. For genres we've got action, political thriller, sci-fi, fantasy, and musical. You know what's missing, though? Zombies. Not for long, hopefully: Cranston is in talks for a "small but flashy" role in the post-apocalyptic zombie thriller World War Z. THR could not uncover more about the role; if any readers of the source novel by Max Brooks have an idea, please share in the comments.
Brad Pitt, Mireille Enos, Anthony Mackie, and James Badge Dale also star in World War Z, which views the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse through a number of perspectives, from mercenaries to US government officials to impoverished Palestinians. Directed by Marc Forster (Quantum of Solace), the adaptation is currently in production for a 2012 release. Read the full book synopsis after the jump.
“The end was near.” —Voices from the Zombie War
The Zombie War came unthinkably close to eradicating humanity. Max Brooks, driven by the urgency of preserving the acid-etched first-hand experiences of the survivors from those apocalyptic years, traveled across the United States of America and throughout the world, from decimated cities that once teemed with upwards of thirty million souls to the most remote and inhospitable areas of the planet. He recorded the testimony of men, women, and sometimes children who came face-to-face with the living, or at least the undead, hell of that dreadful time. World War Z is the result. Never before have we had access to a document that so powerfully conveys the depth of fear and horror, and also the ineradicable spirit of resistance, that gripped human society through the plague years.
Ranging from the now infamous village of New Dachang in the United Federation of China, where the epidemiological trail began with the twelve-year-old Patient Zero, to the unnamed northern forests where untold numbers sought a terrible and temporary refuge in the cold, to the United States of Southern Africa, where the Redeker Plan provided hope for humanity at an unspeakable price, to the west-of-the-Rockies redoubt where the North American tide finally started to turn, this invaluable chronicle reflects the full scope and duration of the Zombie War.
Most of all, the book captures with haunting immediacy the human dimension of this epochal event. Facing the often raw and vivid nature of these personal accounts requires a degree of courage on the part of the reader, but the effort is invaluable because, as Mr. Brooks says in his introduction, “By excluding the human factor, aren’t we risking the kind of personal detachment from history that may, heaven forbid, lead us one day to repeat it? And in the end, isn’t the human factor the only true difference between us and the enemy we now refer to as ‘the living dead’?” [Amazon]